Memorial Weekend in NY/NJ & HELLO KITTY!!!

With nothing else better to do this Memorial weekend, my friends and I decided to go to NJ/NY. Well...actually, there is a very important reason to visit NY this time. I saw a post from Hello Kitty Hell about a Hello Kitty exhibition by Tom Sachs in NYC. So, the mission of this trip is to see the Hello Kitty statue!!!

The collection is located at Gordon Bunshaft’s Modernist Park Ave tower and it includes one gigantic Hello Kitty, a 10-foot-tall Hello Kitty fountain, a 10-foot-tall Miffy fountain, and a My Melody statue. We took so many pictures, I just couldn't resist!!! And of course, we also went to the Sanrio store in Time Square. Unfortunately I didn't find anything special this time, just a pair of Hello Kitty eggs.



And on our way back to Chinatown, we walked by Garrett Popcorn and the sweet buttery smell is totally irresistable, so we bought some to snack in the car. We also tried a couple new Chinese restaurants in Chinatown this time and had my favorite 車仔麵 (noodle cooked in a cart) and Ming's favorite seafood dinner. As usual, we also visited New Jersey Mitsuwa Marketplace at Edgewater, which was holding a Gourmet Food Fair. They had sweet potato apple pie, dorayaki (red bean paste pancake), kaisen sanshoku bento box (ikura/salmon roe, uni/sea urchin and fish over rice) and many more Japanese specalities!!! There is also the Memorial weekend special, shark fin noodle soup. Writing this makes me hungry!!!



And the last stop of our trip is SHOPPING!!!! We really didn't have that much time left, so we only went to two stores in SoHo, then head on out to the Woodbury Outlets. And according to Ming, he's finally found a store where there are better men's clothes than women's and that's Uniqlo at SoHo.

Strut Your Mutt Dog Parade, Bethesda, MD

It was a beatutiful day on Sat and was definitely the perfect weather for the doggies. A lot of people and doggies were already there when we arrived, but it wasn't as crowded as last year. Only one street was blocked off for the booths, compared to two streets of vendors from last year parade. I guess it has something to do with downturn of the economy because there were hardly any dog clothes booths. I was a bit disappointed because of it since I was looking forward to all those cute little puppy outfits. But I still had a great time with Moby and my friends and Moby was wearing her new red dress....super cute as always!

Iron Man Rules!

Finally saw Iron Man yesterday and I was genuinely impressed with the movie. Robert Downey Jr. was awesome and made me believe that if there's a Tony Stark/Iron Man in this world, then he is the man. The CG was realistic and I like the scene when he tried on the arm piece on the 3D panel and the funny 3D trash can. Overall, well-paced, good action sequence, good comedy and a good looking RDJ.

Robert Downey Jr. in Elton John - I Want Love MTV

On the hunt for a good Online Backup

So, I've spent the past couple of days searching for a good reliable online backup. I tested out a few of them with hugh free space (Scribd, Adrive, Mediamax-now called thelinkup) only to find out how much I don't like them.

Then I went on to read another tons of reviews/blogs on yet another list of online backup services (Mozy, HP Upline, Carbonite, Microsoft Windows LIve Skydrive, IDrive, IBackup, etc), and the conclusion is that I don't really like any of them either.

Finally I came across this blog about, dropbox and it looks so much simpler than the other online backup services. I'm still waiting for the beta invite, hopefully I'll get one soon. For now, I'll continue to rely on my local backup drive.

Forbidden Kingdom

The story is based loosely on the Chinese literature Journey to the West (西遊記) but transformed to fit the Western taste. Overall it's a good entertaining movie but I'll have to say my favorite scene in the whole movie is the Jackie Chan vs Jet Li fight scene. I thought it was done beautifully and every punch and kick was well calculated. I'd love to see that again! Otherwise, the story is quite predictable with a few good laughs.

Cheat River White Water Rafting

It's been almost a year since I wrote my blog. And once again, I'm writing about my white water rafting trip. We went this past Sunday and Pak and Calvin decided to join us this year but since they are newbies so we chose Cheat river, a level 3/4 river. This time we have Ming, Rosa, Pak, Calvin and I on board, everyone else is busy. Overall, it was an OK trip because it's definitely slower and the drops are smaller too. I think Pak and Calvin were a bit bored but we had to get them started on a level 3/4 first. But next time, we can go back to level 5 rivers. But according to the guide, there aren't that many good level 5 in this area, so we'll see.

SF & Whistler Ski Trip, Vancouver

We are back on earth and we had a wonderful vacation, it was nice to visit KK and his friends. There were too many good restaurants in San Francisco and we only had three days to taste them all. Trust me, we tried our best and you'd know if you have traveled with us to Toronto before! As you can see from the photos, the weather was only so-so there but KK kept saying that it's not normal and that we must have brought the rain with us to San Francisco. We went to dim sum twice because it was too good, even better Toronto and also had Japanese for a couple of meals. And of course, we did some typical see tourist attractions such as the Ghirardelli Square and Fisherman's Wharf on San Francisco Bay, and Alcatraz "The Rock". Too bad we only looked at the Golden Gate Bridge from afar but we didn't have any more time to fit in any other activities.

After that, we flew to Canada for our ski adventure. And we must have brought the snow with us to Whistler, but then who cares if it snows 24/7, it is so beautiful there. Lucky I only had a 2 GB memory card with us, otherwise, I'd have taken too many pictures. We skied four days straight and still had covered only about 60% of the trails. There will still be plenty of trails to explore the next time when we return. The highest peek we visited was 6,900ft. It was awesome up there and we almost burnt out all of our energy to get down the mountain and we were walking like old people. On the first day, I fell pretty hard once while I was adjusting to powder snow and Teresa said I flipped over 180 degrees. In fact, one of my skis hit my head but I was lucky that I have my helmet on. Teresa fell a couple of times face-down on the third day because she was going down slope a bit too fast and lost control a bit. We had such a great time out there and would love to go back for the 2010 Olympics. That's it for this time, stay tune for our next adventure and I hope you enjoy the pictures!!!

To obtain more photos from our trip, please visit:

SF Pictures
Whistler Pictures
Videos